It’s a pretty poor photo even by my standards, but you can see the weird, angular head, and the disproportionately long and sharp bill, features that always make me think of a heron when I see Rooks.

I’ve lived among Rooks on a couple of different occasions, but my fondest memories are from a place the species did not breed. Evening flocks passing over Westphalia, with Jackdaws and Carrion and Hooded Crows mixed in, were a sure sign that winter was near, and we knew to stay out until after dark to listen as the hisses of Redwings took over from the barking and croaking of the corvids.

All told, we saw more individual European Oystercatchers than all the other species combined. At Fishguard Harbor, Alison found a few dozen roosting on the rocks; they came down to feed as the tide withdrew, mixing with smaller numbers of Ruddy Turnstone, Common Redshank, and Eurasian Curlew.

Newport was better, in spite of the sailing race being held the morning we were there.

The mouth of the Nevern attracted yet more oystercatchers, plus small numbers of Common Ringed Plover, Common Redshank, Dunlin, Ruddy Turnstone, and a few delicately scalloped Red Knot juveniles.

The prize here, though, was a lone Bar-tailed Godwit, feeding close to shore among the European Herring and Black-headed Gulls.

From the Arctic to the coast of Wales–a traveler farther-flung even than we were!

Once again I had to think of James Fisher, whose love for this charismatic petrel resulted in one of the great classics of twentieth-century bird writing, The Fulmar. And who could fault his taste, watching these lovely creatures skim the waves, then tower high in front of the cliffs?

Every morning in Wales felt like a red-letter day, with the whistles and screams of European Herring Gulls out the window as we woke up. Right on the rocky coast, this was the most abundant gull, always in sight, wheeling on the wind or feeding on the fields.

At any distance from the sea, they were joined by massive Great Black-backed and handsome Lesser Black-backed Gulls, often in mixed flocks with Rooks and Jackdaws.

Only in the harbors did we see significant numbers of Black-headed Gulls, mostly adults entering their lovely basic plumage.

We did see a few birds molting from juvenile to first-winter plumage, heavily marked mixtures of gray and brown that almost recall a phalarope; this is a plumage I have not seen often.

Not that many years ago, Mediterranean Gull was a moderate rarity in Wales; over the past decade or so, the species has increased so much that certain sites, like Fishguard Harbor, regularly host multiple individuals. And so we were pleased but not necessarily surprised to discover a single bird among the Black-headed Gulls on the seawall at Goodwick.

This is a beautiful bird, the second-most beautiful larid in the world (guess!). In the field, I identified this as a second-year bird, but haven’t had a chance yet to compare the pattern of the outer primary to spread-wing specimens.

Anybody out there less lazy than I am?

European Robin, that bird so familiar even to us North Americans from Christmas cards and children’s books, is a prime example. We heard dozens of them on our visit to the United Kingdom, their sharp Passerina-like chip issuing from every hedge and thicket and the occasional song trickling up the scale. But see ‘em? We could count on one hand the number of good sightings we had of this abundant and normally so confiding species. The adults were in molt, nervous and secretive, and few were the individuals who dared emerge from their hiding places with us in the neighborhood.

This scruffy little guy (they can’t be sexed in the field, so far as I know) was lured from his leafy bunker only by the abundance of small caterpillars under the fence; as the top rail bears witness, the bird had evidently been feeding here for a while.

Even skulkier were the spotted and scaled juveniles, giving just the odd glimpse from inside the dense vegetation. But this bird, newly molted into the freshest and snazziest of first-winter plumages, was proud enough to sit in the tree just above our heads for as long as we chose to admire:

Ah, youth!

Of course, the robins aren’t alone in getting their new coats. Adult House Sparrows too were looking a little rough around the edges.

And Lesser Black-backed Gulls were showing those odd white covert bars so typical of molting larids.

A bird in the open, said Ogden Nash, never looks / like its picture in the birdy-books. I think he must have been birding in August.

Alison and I were especially eager to find Red-billed Chough, a rare and declining small crow that breeds on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire. And sure enough, a single individual dived over our heads at Trefin, giving that harsh sh’rring screech that gives these birds their (not entirely fitting) name. Common Ravens lived up to their epithet, too, on the coastal cliffs, honking and croaking as they played on the winds.

It was a very good corvid show all around, with Black-billed Magpies among the commonest of roadside birds

and Carrion Crows at every woodland edge. Western Jackdaws patrolled the lawns and churchyards,

and joined the mixed flocks of larids and Rooks on the fields.

Of all this corvid diversity, it was the Rooks that fascinated most with their odd, baggy-pants walk on the ground, their grating calls, and their occasional fits of acrobatic exuberance.

Alison and I were fortunate enough to spend the week after this year’s British Bird Fair in Pembrokeshire, right on the coast of the Irish Sea. We stayed in Penparc, halfway between Fishguard and St. David’s, and spent our time walking a tiny fraction of the 186 miles of coastal path, birding, and enjoying the sites on this my first visit to Wales.

Birding was relaxed, with less to be seen than hoped. But the landscapes and seascapes we enjoyed on our walks were nothing short of spectacular, incredibly green fields and hills dropping off as breath-taking cliffs. Some of the warning signs did little to soothe the worries of an acrophobe:

This one made me laugh each time I saw it–and step carefully back from the too-close edge….

If birds were sparse, the flowers and insects were dazzling. This one, David tells me, is called ragged robin, a wonderful name for a wonderful plant.

Heather was dense on the steeper hills.

The only purpler flower was this sturdy specimen, its name unknown to me so far:

All of this nectar was irresistible to the insects, even to insects in spe:

This 2-inch morsel was on–literally and dangerously on–the coastal path; I wonder what weird and wonderful moth eventually results.

We didn’t look much at butterflies, but some were hard to resist. This enchanting creature is named, somewhat disappointingly, the Wall Brown.

One of the most conspicuous leps in Europe is the Io Peacock, and it never fails to elicit gasps of admiration.

But what stopped us in our tracks every day were the bumblebees, beautiful, sluggish tigers drowsing in the flowers of a cold morning.